ANALYSIS: It’s the small crimes that bring you down. Al Capone went merrily on his murdering way until the FBI nailed him for tax evasion... So it is with Jacob Zuma.
It’s the small crimes that bring you down. Al Capone went merrily on his murdering way until the FBI nailed him for tax evasion. Richard Nixon seemed immune to the consequences of lying about Vietnam, Cambodia and Chile but his lies over the silly crime of burgling the Democratic Party’s headquarters did him in.
A question that invariably gets asked is whether power changed him. The country’s former foreign intelligence chief, Moe Shaik, seemed to think so, writing glowingly of the capable “struggle” version of Zuma, suggesting it was only as president that things went awry, although he noted that we will never know when “precisely Jacob Zuma lost his way”.
I ignored the request. But it was one of several signs I’d seen that Zuma was despised within the Communist Party. When Zuma returned to South Africa in 1990, KwaZulu-Natal was in the midst of a territorial war between the ANC and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Zulu nationalist Inkatha movement. He emerged as ANC leader there after seeing off the ANC warlord Harry Gwala, using his charm and Zulu credentials to secure the peace. But this came at a cost. The ANC drew some of Inkatha’s most notorious killers into its fold and a new form of violence broke out.
Zuma was acquitted while the alleged victim was vilified, with Zuma and his supporters singing his favourite song, Lethu Mshini Wami during and after the trial. The woman, later named as Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, fled into exile for safety. She returned after a decade and died in 2016.
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